Canada’s largest newspaper company has announced 54 layoffs at its British Columbia subsidiary, which owns the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province.

Postmedia Network Canada Corp. told staff Friday that the layoffs at Pacific Newspaper Group are part of a previously announced plan to reduce salary costs by 20 per cent across the company’s nationwide operations.

“The Vancouver notice to the union today is further to our previously announced salary-cost reduction initiative and the end of the voluntary buyout process,” said Phyllise Gelfand, Postmedia’s vice president for communications. “Continued economic pressures and revenue declines require ongoing focus on cost-cutting initiatives. The process is being undertaken in accordance with the collective agreement.”

Unifor Local 2000, which represents employees at Pacific Newspaper Group, said that the layoffs, combined with the departure of 38 staff who took voluntary buyouts in January, “would reduce the entire staff by 42 per cent.”

Postmedia had roughly 4,000 employees across Canada when the 20-per-cent reduction target was first announced in October. CWA Canada, which represents journalists at the Gazette and Citizen, said earlier this year that “Postmedia has cut more than 3,000 jobs in the last six years.”

In early January, Postmedia reported a profit of $17.1 million for the first quarter of its 2017 fiscal year, but said it would continue to pursue cost-cutting measures to match steep declines in revenue from its print products. The quarterly profit was largely the product of a one-time, $78-million gain on a debt-restructuring deal approved as part of a corporate plan of arrangement in October 2016. The debt-restructuring removed approximately $307 million in debt and $50 million in annual cash interest payments from Postmedia’s books, according to the company.

In addition to a 14.4-per-cent decline in overall revenue to $214.9 million in the quarter, Postmedia said that print advertising revenue fell $31.1 million, or 21.9 per cent, and that print circulation revenue fell $6.1 million, or 9 per cent.

One area of particular contention for the union is executive compensation: $2.3 million was awarded to Postmedia’s five most senior executives in the form of retention bonuses, which the company said was to ensure they remained in their positions during and after the implementation of the recapitalization plan. Since the retention bonuses were disclosed, two of the executives who received them — corporate counsel Jeffrey Haar and CFO Doug Lamb — have left Postmedia.

“We’ve received no explanation as to why $2.3-million has been paid out in executive bonuses while hard-working staff are being shown the door,” Unifor Local 2000 president Brian Gibson said in a statement released Friday.

In an interview published last month in Toronto Life, Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey, who received a retention bonus of $900,000 on top of his $950,000 base salary, said the optics of the bonuses “weren’t pretty.” However, he said that Chatham Asset Management, the New Jersey-based hedge fund that backed Postmedia’s debt restructuring, “handed over $100 million but first wanted assurances that key employees, me included, would stay. Did I feel awkward about the bonus? Yes. But how would staff feel if we shut down and there were no severance deals at all?”

Layoffs and buyouts are not the only cost-cutting measures the company is currently pursuing. A day before announcing the cuts at Pacific Newspaper Group, Postmedia said it would implement changes to staff pensions and benefits, including an end to defined-benefit pension plans, the elimination of top-up payments for maternity and paternity leave and the cancellation of an employee assistance program which provides confidential short-term financial, workplace and mental-health counselling.